Remember the article I wrote in praise of kit lenses, including the Sony FE 28-70mm f/3.5-5.6? Yeah, about that…

I tested my lenses on the Sony A7RV body, to see if they’re up to snuff. Let’s just say that I’m starting to get what some people were talking about. The 28-70mm is consistently less sharp than all the other lenses I tested, and while in the centre I would say it meets the minimal requirements for resolution, toward the sides and especially in the corners it is much worse.

The cause of the problem is obvious. The new body magnifies the image more, demanding more resolution from the optics. It used to be that the 35mm format was very easy on the lenses, unlike the four thirds or APS-C, which basically pull the same resolution out of a smaller circle, and a lens needs to be really great to be critically sharp on a smaller format. Basically, an APS-C body with a 24MP sensor will pull as much information from the smaller APS-C circle, that a 24MP full frame body will pull from the bigger 35mm circle.

The Sony A7RV body with 61MP pulls 26MP from the APS-C circle alone, and continues to make those demands across the 35mm frame.

I’m usually not all that obsessed with image sharpness at 100% magnification; it’s like viewing film under a microscope. It is expected that the lenses won’t draw a perfectly sharp image from centre to corners at full magnification, so the criterion is image that is good enough for printing big enough. Basically, I decided that the 28-70mm lens is the only one of my lenses that would create problems when printing big, and since my use for a lens in this range is landscapes from a tripod, which means sharp stuff that is most likely to be printed big, I decided it’s time for an upgrade. The good news is that the FE 16-35mm f/4 Zeiss and the FE 50mm f/1.8 are just fine, even though I tested the Zeiss at 35mm, which is its “softest” focal length. I didn’t even test the FE 90mm f/2.8 G macro; not only is it one of the sharpest lenses in the world, but also the closeups are generally more tolerant of magnification, because they lack the high-frequency detail such as grass, leaves or pine needles, that require sharpness on the landscape shots.

The actual reason why I finally decided to replace the 28-70mm is not this test, but the results from the last time I used it to actually take pictures, and I was shocked to find that almost nothing was sharp, and that was on the A7II. It looked as if the image stabilisation introduced some kind of an optical defect that looked like some kind of haze that blurred out the high-frequency detail, and the photos were not usable. It performed much better on the tripod, but still noticeably worse than the other two lenses I compared it with, and I decided it’s giving me too much trouble with inconsistency and I’m just done with it. I can’t rely on it to just consistently produce images to a certain standard, and instead it varies between quite nice and fucking awful, and that is simply not acceptable.

What did I replace it with? Initially, I considered the FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM II and the FE 20-70mm f/4 G, but then decided against them both. The f/2.8 GM is excellent, but its strongest point is versatility as an all-around lens for everything, and this makes it quite heavy and super expensive. I don’t need f/2.8 aperture for a landscape lens that will be used at f/8-f/16 apertures. As for the 20-70mm f/4 G, it is much better suited for my needs, but it tries to overlap with the 16-35mm too hard and I’m not sure I need that. I ended up going with the FE 24-105mm f/4 G, simply because this is an excellent range for the intended purpose, and it is widely used and highly esteemed by landscape photographers, so I don’t expect to have issues with the lack of resolution. Sure, something will always be sharper, but I don’t need this to be the sharpest lens in the world, I just need it to keep up with my other glass and not create a blurry mess at random unpredictable moments. The FE 24-105mm f/4G is a workhorse lens relied upon to produce predictable results by many photographers and that appealed to me, because I need something that just works, and not create problems.

I keep encountering the conundrum of whether to upgrade camera or lenses first, and there’s occasionally a comparison of a high-end camera paired with a low-cost lens, against a low-end camera paired with a high-end lens, as if that’s a dilemma anyone is actually having.

I had a similar problem lately, when I decided I want to buy the FE 100-400mm GM lens, because I wanted to make a certain profile of pictures with it, but I of course understood that the autofocus on my camera isn’t capable of utilising the lens properly, and there’s our solution: camera and lens need to be seen as a unit that is combined to produce a certain result. This means that you can’t have bottlenecks that limit the effectiveness of the system as a whole, for instance you can’t have only one part of the fast autofocus system, because both camera and lens need to work together.

Also, the realistic conundrum isn’t whether to get the most expensive lens and pair it with the shittiest possible body, or vice versa. Realistically, it looks more like “should I get the 70-200 f/2.8 or 85mm f/1.8 for the portraits”, because “cheap lens” is often a fast prime, and “expensive lens” is often a zoom, where the cheap lens might actually give you better results; also, with the body it’s “do I need faster autofocus for portraits and weddings”, because that’s where the difference in price is today. If you’re shooting macro, you don’t need a body with the best autofocus, you need a great macro lens and, probably, additional lights. So, basically, the answer is to see what you actually need, where the bottlenecks of your process are, and then remove those bottlenecks. Someone else will have different problems to solve, and different money pits to fill. Sometimes the solution is counter-intuitive, for instance getting the expensive new camera body and cheap used lenses of otherwise very high quality, which looks like putting cheap lenses on an expensive camera, but in this case price is not an accurate measure of quality obtained. In any case, the lesson is to avoid formulaic thinking when solving practical problems.

It was a nice springy day today so I’m showing off my new gear a bit. 🙂
ps. WordPress compressed the files on upload so sharpness is much, much lower than on the originals. 

I discovered something when testing the new camera and lens today. It works best for taking the kind of pictures I normally take, only of things that are inaccessible because they are far away.

Also, I’m still in a B&W mood.

I’ve been having interestingly contradictory thoughts recently. On one hand, all kinds of disasters are looming. On the other hand, the largest percentage of my consciousness is preoccupied with transforming karmic substance from global sources. And on the third hand, I’m preoccupying myself with various things in order not to go crazy. So, apparently, it’s photography’s turn now. The weather here on Hvar is gloomy and not really conducive to creating colourful imagery at the moment, so I’m doing what I can and shooting black and white gloomy stuff:

The new A7RV camera and the FE 100-400mm GM lens are in the mail and should be here in a day or two, and then I’ll be able to say what I think about them, but honestly, it’s not like I’ve seen any telephoto motives lately. It’s the most dour part of what passes for winter on the normally sunniest Adriatic island. So, I’ve been walking with A7II and the Zeiss 16-35mm, and I really like the results.

Speaking of which, what made me upgrade to the A7RV? Essentially, it’s not that I really planned it much. I looked into the recent developments in photo equipment, and by “recent” I mean the last 8 years or so, and I was amazed at how far some things progressed. So, when I decided to go for the telephoto lens, I also decided it’s time for a camera upgrade, because if something manages to impress me, it’s really good. Ignoring the cameras that specialise in video at all cost, and speed at all cost, I wanted something that had the best resolution and dynamic range I can get on the 35mm Sony platform, and also the fastest, smartest autofocus. This narrowed it down to A1II (50MP) and A7RV (60MP), which I already found super impressive earlier, and I decided that for my specific case of “photographic quality first” the A7RV is slightly better, and the fact that it was also less expensive didn’t hurt. I was considering the older model too, the A7RIV, because it has the same sensor and thus the same image quality, but eventually decided against it because all the other electronics were seriously improved on the newer model. Also, the new model gives me the option to shoot 26MP RAW in cases where I don’t need resolution greater than what I already have now, which is a good option to have because it saves storage, and if I’m shooting hand-held closeups where most of the image is blurred out, 26MP is already an overkill, because the super-resolution files are something I would need for shots with lots of high-frequency detail, such as wide-angle landscapes, that would benefit most from being printed large. So, this versatility appealed to me, because it’s not like my current camera suddenly became outdated with its 24MP; I fully intend on using it as a second body for the wide-angle in cases where the A7RV is married to the telephoto. Anything I take with it can be printed quite large, and in other respects (meaning colour and the dynamic range) it should be identical to the new body.

PS. the new acquisitions arrived:

On the left, the A7II with the 16-35mm Zeiss. On the right, the new A7RV with the FE 100-400mm GM. Everything works, but other than configuring and cleaning them I didn’t have a chance to do much, since it’s a nice day finally and fresh fish arrives on Wednesday, so something had to be done about that. 🙂

The first experiences are that the grip on the new camera is more comfortable and bigger, which was one of the main problems with the old one. Also, the AF seems as fast as on the EOS 3, from what I could see; everything is exactly as heavy as I calculated from the online numbers, but manageable. The birbs are very quick and mostly hidden in the trees so I couldn’t score any quick wins, but that is not unexpected. The fish was tasty.